Chapter Twelve
Josie stared at the blank wall.
Then she touched it. Next she smelled it.
Huh.
Sometime between Friday night and Saturday midmorning, this wall had changed color from white to yellow.
The roses had been unsettling.
This wall was downright freaky.
Not that Josie disliked the color. This yellow was the color of the walls she’d pictured in her daydreams about living somewhere beautiful and sipping coffee in a room drenched in sunlight.
The perfect shade to catch the sun and reflect it back onto the warm wood floors and her beloved green velvet couch.
Josie and Dan had found the couch at the Salvation Army and had given it a good steam cleaning before they brought it home. Even so, Gloria had shit a brick when they’d told her where it came from.
“Who knows what is living in there?” she’d screeched, freshly manicured hands waving in the air as though hordes of cooties were going to come flying out of the cushions at her. Al had nodded in agreement, taken a seat on the couch, and turned on the TV to watch the Masters.
“Alan.” The horror in Gloria’s voice had melted into the scorn she reserved for lecturing her husband. “For Christ’s sake don’t sit on it. What if you catch something?”
Maybe a ghost had done it.
Maybe the ghost of an interior designer haunted her apartment and decided to paint last night. Having a haunted apartment would normally be a negative, but what was the alternative? Was she losing her mind? Having ministrokes?
The intercom buzzed and Josie tapped the wall with her forefinger twice before leaving the living room.
Josie pressed the speaker button. “Hello?”
“Hi. Ms. LaChiusa, this is Joey. Joey Z.”
Shit. She’d promised to meet this morning with Joey and Pax to mark off the patio and garden design with stakes and tape so the committee could approve it and move on to the next stage.
“I’m coming right down,” she said.
“Okay. Hey. Hey, we have the same name, sort of. Joey and Josie. We could both be Joes. That’s cool, right?
We could get our name on the back of T-shirts.
Jo and Joe. People would…oh, there you are.
” Joey looked up from the intercom at her approach and waved.
His left arm sported a ring of bracelets made from crocheted duct tape.
The skin beneath was less patchy and red than it had been a few days ago at the garden center.
“Wow that was fast.” His smile was so bright and genuine it took Josie a moment to process his next words. “Is Amos with his grandparents?”
A rush of fear scratched the length of her spine. “How do you know about Amos’s grandparents?”
The words came out in a cold rush and froze Joey’s smile into something twisted.
“I, uh, I saw them pick him up this morning?”
His widened eyes and drooping mouth could have been an expression of hurt or of guilt. Either way, the wounded-puppy look wouldn’t work on Josie.
No siree.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
She’d softened her tone, but Joey’s enthusiasm was visibly dampened, and he dragged his feet across the dingy carpet of the meeting room, silent until they exited the door to the courtyard.
Folks from the garden committee as well as a few onlookers stood in a semicircle around Maddy. She held up a sketch to pleased murmurs, and Joey went to stand at her side.
“I’ve marked the exact distance between each of the garden boxes so they are uniform in size,” Maddy said. “Space is equally allotted between the concrete surface of the patio and the spaces set aside for plants.”
Someone objected to the plan for shrubbery and another person complained about the square meters allotted to perennials. They sounded angry, and Josie turned her back on the group to investigate the pile of soil.
You could see it was good soil: black and rich with the faint hint of manure. To the side of the pile stood a wheelbarrow and shovel, yanking Josie back to her years on her grandparents’ farm.
Mostly they grew feed grains like sorghum and milo, along with a few acres of corn and, best of all, sunflowers for sunflower seed oil.
Josie had a small produce stand out by the main road, and when fall came, she’d pick bouquets of the sunflowers and sell them to the folks from San Antonio driving down toward the Gulf.
The color of the wall in her apartment was the same lemony gold of the sunflowers she used to bundle.
While the other tenants argued, Josie shoveled dirt into the wheelbarrow, memories of early adolescence woken by the scrape of the shovel’s blade into the pile of earth and the smell of turned soil.
Kneeling at the side of the dirt pile, Josie took off her mitten and stuck her hand deep into the soil.
Winter still had its grip on March and the promise of spring seemed like a cruel tease.
The dirt was freezing cold and her fingertips tingled uncomfortably.
Josie closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of stone, exhaling everything that had preoccupied her this morning.
Couches, Gloria, kisses, and ghosts seeped out of her brain, and in their place, she planted hopeful seeds.
She visualized planting a garden like in Amos’s favorite book, Planting a Rainbow.
She planted a seed of hope that Barb went out to the movies with her husband instead of staying home and bingeing old episodes of America’s Most Wanted.
She planted a seed of hope that Gloria was being patient with Amos. She hoped…
“What are you doing?”
Josie didn’t have to open her eyes to know it was Pax who crouched on the other side of the wheelbarrow. Even before The Kiss, she’d been hyperaware of his body, sensitive to how he took up space even when he stood across the lobby from her.
Pax, who touched her kitchen wall as though it was wounded. Pax, who tapped her kitchen counter to still the lights. Who appeared at the same time as roses and smelled like cinnamon when he hedged. Who looked at Josie as though she was a desirable woman and not simply a single mom.
She opened her eyes knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. His character and intentions couldn’t be read on his expressionless face, but when he laid his palm on the top of the dirt heap, Josie sensed his presence. Solid and generous, like the soil beneath them.
His intentions?
If the heat from his hand was any indication, his intentions were genuine. Whether they were admirable was a whole other question.
“I’m planting the soil with hopes.”
With anyone else, Josie would have never told the truth. She would have said something self-deprecating, then turned the question back on them.
He had the power to make her reckless, this man—something deeper than the lightheaded back-and-forth swing of attraction. A belief that flipping backward from the swing will be okay. That she will stick the landing.
“What kind of hopes?” Joey Z. stood next to Pax, wringing his duct tape–covered hands.
“It’s something my grandpa used to do each spring,” Josie explained. Her breath hitched when Denis came to stand behind Joey, but she continued.
Why the hell not?
“He would gather everyone around and say a prayer.” Quoting Galatians, Grampa would hold his battered green John Deere cap in his supple fingers and remind Josie, Gramma, and the rest of the farm help that a man reaps what he sows.
“Then he would put his hand in the earth and tell us what hope he’d planted that spring. ”
One of the tenants Josie hadn’t met yet, a person with sallow skin and astonishingly wide blue eyes, plopped down and put their hand next to Pax’s on the soil.
“Like what?” Blue-Eyes asked.
As folks gathered around them the warmth of bodies at Josie’s back both comforted her and creeped her out.
“The kind of hopes you wouldn’t think a farmer would plant. They were never practical,” she said. “They were pie-in-the-sky kind of hopes. Like, everyone got to see a rainbow that year or everyone would get a gift in their favorite color.”
Back when she was thirteen or fourteen, she’d cringed at Grampa’s language, embarrassed in front of the men who worked her grandfather’s fields. Not until years later had Josie appreciated the offhand poetry of his words.
“I would wish for pies from the skies, too,” Joey Z. said earnestly.
“What kind of pies?” came the question from someone behind her.
One of the older folks who dressed in color-coordinated tracksuits knelt at Josie’s side and stuck their hand on the dirt.
“Custard cream,” they announced.
One by one, the tenants put their hands on the soil, planting hope after sugar-laden hope.
The loamy smell of sun-warmed dirt and tree buds and pollen-dusted new shoots filled the air.
Someone laughed and someone else hummed a tune Josie had never heard but remembered all the same.
Even the breeze played along, whispering softly past Josie’s cheek, riffling through Pax’s hair.
Through all this, he kept his eyes on her, expression unmoving, intensity unwavering. Everyone around them could have been made of smoke for all the effect they had on the connection between Josie and Pax.
“I hope we finish yammering and get to planting something.” Denis shoved his way in between Blue-Eyes and Joey. “Hope this wasted time won’t leave us with nothing but boxes full of weeds.”
Joey Z. sighed and Blue-Eyes shook their head as the faint scent of coconut cream disappeared. A reluctant agreement passed between a few of the tenants, and one by one they moved away from the soil and bickered softly among themselves about annuals versus perennials and the use of pesticides.
Maddy came over and pointedly cleared her throat. “Pax. Don’t you have something to do over here? By me? You know, that thing?”
Pax held Josie’s gaze for a moment longer until she blushed and looked away like a coward. He rose, brushed his hands together to rid himself of most of the dirt, nodded at her once, turned, and left.